... to question the split of childcare cost with XP ?

[Gster]

Should start of by saying I'm a guy. Not that I think it makes any difference here.

Split with XP recently, still trying to sort out access times and money amicably.

Although I currently give her £630pm + cost of shoes, half of DDs holiday costs, family meals out etc, I'm going to suggest I reduce it to the CSA calculation ( £350 ) and split any other DD costs 50:50 including nursery costs from September.

However, my XP, who is pretty well sorted financially with no mortgage and a hundred grand in the bank, want's me to split the childcare costs for when she's working.

She has a mothers dream job in media. Gets around £200ph and works anywhere betweene 2 - 10 hours a week. But if she has a one hour job for an hour in the morning she'll get childcare ( if granny can't do it ) in for the morning to cover.

She'd like me to pay 50% of this. Am I being unreasonable to think I should offer less than 50% of this ? She keeps telling me she's doing me a favour by looking after DD in the week and thus saving full time nursery costs.

Doubt the RP gets anything but Child benefit. I'm sure nobody is petty enough to argue about who gets half of £18, are they?

I daresay RP has to travel to work! Maybe she works for one or two hours, but she may also potentially need another 2 hours' travelling time. I agree that there's nothing black and white about this.

ChippingIn - that is a really good list.

Yeah, CB - £18 a week. Woo fucking hoo. It makes all the difference to my life. Not.

Must say I'm quite suprised by this thread. My view is that childcare should absolutely be for the RP to pay.

OP I would pay whatever CSA says or more if you so wish but not the childcare. Thats ridiculous as you have no say in what happens with regard to that and the affordability of it therefore cant be expected to stump up for it......

I say that as a lone parent of 4.

And plenty of single mothers would like their other half to have the chidlren half the time. It's a shame that so very many men who want 50% contact and would bite off the hand asking for them to have the children and pay for the nanny, nursery etc during that period cannot get it and legions of full time working single mothers would quite like not to have the chidlren 365 days a year as I do and there are also all those men out there who refuse them. Pity the two groups of men can't be merged into one.

If we had an obligatory 50% of time with each parent particularly where you both work full time then you wuiodln't need to pay anything, split child benefit 50% each and just pay for the children when tehy are with you and their nanny cost or nusery or au pair or whatever.

Just because parents are separated does not make them any less the parents of the child(ren). They still have equal responsibility for the children in the equation. In fact their relationship with their children should change as little as possible, resident or non-resident parent.

In practise obviously the mere fact of no longer sharing a house with the child will change the relationship with them (ie no more stories every evening, no more messing around in the back garden on a whim, etc..) but both parents should make a huge effort to ensure (assuming the NR was a good enough parent) that the children keep up a lot of contact with their NR parent. That relationship is not for the parents to decide. It is a separate relationship from the relationship between the parents. The relationship between NR P and the children ought to be separate from alimony and custody issues (barring substandard parenting). I know this is probably a lot more difficult when one or other parent may be harbouring often legitimate grievances against the other parent, but it is most important not to allow these to affect the child and parents' relationship.

If a dad (and most often the dad is the NR parent) was disinterested in the child when he was with the mother however I'm not surprised if he continues to be disinterested when they separate, or even becomes entirely disinterested. It just makes me really cross that fathers often have not the first clue about things like parents' evenings, clubs, who their child's friends are, what size shoes their child is in, etc even when they are with the mother and then are somehow expect to stay involved on a far deeper level when they separate. These may seem to be trivial things to a person focused on their own needs but they are all things that matter a lot to the child- yet the father is very happy to delegate it all to the mother and then feel aggrieved that they do not know their child better.

£600+ a Month?

For one child?

Seems like someone's paying all the costs here.

Childcare is a flipping cost!! Why would it not be?

As I saida bove the school/university costs of my 5 were/are £50k a year for a start out of taxed income which is which is over £4k a month. Then you feed them. Then you clothe them. You house them - you need a bigger house than if it were just you in a one bed flat. And as all resident parents know there is also the day by day drip feed reuirements money for school, sponsor me, can I have £X to hire a DVD, can I have my bus fare. I have not resented paying 100% of that myself and in effect funding their father's divorce settlement as I chose to work hard and earn a lot but it's certainly expensive to have children and too many people go off abandon the first lot of children and form a nice new happy family putting their second family first and indeed not even pausing to think well I can't actually afford a second family if I'm going to do right by the first.

And even if you use the state system for schooling you wouldn't get much change from £10k a year for a day nursery place (for 4 years, until they go to school) to enable the mother to work for her own keep. Maybe a child doesn't cost more than £200 a month in increased house size, bills, clothes, food, shoes etc (although I have my doubts that the increased house size vs a 1 bed flat needed for the mother alone wouldn't absorb most of that), but the childcare sure as heck would add at least another £800/month- ie an extra £400 to the father's bill.

She is taking the piss.
There would be outrage on here if it was the other way round

And another thing: I know the CSA adjusts maintenance for contact (in an apparently extremely archaic way) so that NR parents pay whatever minus 2/7th of a week (whatever the contact arrangement is). It's not comparing like with like though is it- with most peoples' working week running Monday to Friday, those five days are far more expensive than the weekend unless the dad (it seems to be most often the dad who is NR P) really pushes the boat out on contact days. I can't understand what world the people who organise this stuff are living in. I also can't think of a single good reason why two working people earning say £2000/month, should spend their money in the following way:

Mum: house- £800/month, bills - £200/month, travel to work £100- food £150- childcare £800

Total spend= £2050

She gets say £200/month from the dad, so her income is actually £2250/month, leaving her £200 for incidental expenses such as clothes, shoes etc for herself and the child

Dad: house- £800 (although NR P rarely have a house as big as the mum's as they tend to make more ad hoc arrangements for the odd nights their child stay so I'm being generous)- bills £200, travel to work £100, food £100, maintenance to mother of child £200

Total spend £1400 leaving him with £600 for incidental expenses for himself alone. A £400 difference purely due to childcare that his ex has to pay in order to eat (the £200/month ain't gonna go far).

Duchesse - as I said earlier on in the thread I think that generally childcare costs should be split IF the NRP cannot care for the child instead (there have been cases on here where the Dad wanted to have the child instead (working flex hours) and the mother wouldn't let him but expected him to cough up for half the CC costs?!). However, in cases like this where she can pick & choose her hours, her Mum has the DD often and she has a far greater earning potential it is just taking the P.

Oh for flip's sake!! How is working a luxury or a choice for any resident parent? I just not understand the thinking behind these opinions at all. If even in most nuclear families both parents need to work, why ought a resident parent not work? Surely she would have even more need to work? Not for her convenience or out of choice, but in order to eat? I do not understand how anyone would think otherwise.

It may be in this case that this particular mother does not actually need the money but I do think it sets a dangerous precedent to assume that weekday childcare is purely the RP's parent's responsibility. Somebody is going to have to explain to me why that is the case in very short words because clearly I am missing something here.

I can't read half of what Flojo is saying because big chunks of text appear to be missing in her posts. I wonder if her keyboard is broken?

Also, assuming that the mother needs to travel to work (she can't just teleport instantly I'm assuming even on a large hourly rate), what on earth is wrong with her arranging childcare for the entire morning? Say she works 2 hours in the morning and needs another 2 hours for travel, that's 4 hours x £4-5/hour at childminder rates, or pretty damn near £100 a week if she works every day. Obviously she is not working a set pattern so babysitting will be more ad hoc and almost certainly more expensive.

It's a point of principle to my mind- the RP keeps the children and at the same time removes all the nasty bits of parenting from the NR P. How many NR Ps go to parents' evenings, vaccinations, hospital checkups, shoe shopping? My betting is not many. For the last time, working is not a choice RP make, it's a necessity for most. Unless you assume that the state will step in and sub out the NR P's responsibilities, which whilst psychologically may be better for the RP as it removes the need to negotiate with a potentially difficult ex, but also removes a large swathe of responsibility from the NR P.

Fliss

Do shared parenting and then there is no need for a resident or non-resident parent.

duchesse that annoys me too. Again I'll stress that I'm talking in general here but it annoys me when people say that the RP chooses to work. How the fuck is the RP supposed to pay the bills if they don't work. It's not as if the utility companies/landlords/banks are going to turn round and say 'oh, well, you don't work so we won't expect you to pay us.' The RP often has no choice but to work.

OP either pay half the amount that is needed to feed, cloth etc your daughter and half childcare costs. The maintenance could be paid automatically each month and then you could pay childcare expenses separately when she gives you a bill so you are only paying half seeing as it seems that the amount of childcare required will vary iyswim. Alternatively go for 50/50 residency and you can each pay your own childcare expenses.

I spoke to someone today who has the child exactly 50% of every week. It's not that unusual these days when you b oth work full time (although didn't happen in my situation but I would have been very open to it as we both work full time).

you also look at relative earnings. If mine dwarfed his by a very long way then he is losing living off a very high income and the lower earner often wants to be compensated for that too. If you both earn say £50k then splitting everythign down the middle is fair. I don't see why if one earnes £50k and the other £1m a year or something the lower earner should get any extra money because of that as they have not sacrificed career and are earnings what they would have earned but that's not how the unfair law sees it. They think if you married womeone who did well and you had the life of riley, expensive hair cuts etc like Mrs McCartney then you're entitled to be kept to that standard often for life which is ridiculous.

I see shared parenting as the ideal divorce arrangement for the children assuming both parents are reasonably good at it (ie remember to feed the child, and take on board the level of minute detail required- eg where is the PE kit, when the dental check-up happens, etc...). Obviously shared parenting only works when the parents are communicating well about their child's needs and not merely through their hurt and grievances. The plus in shared parenting is the extra flexibility of having two parents still in the child's life vs the traditional arrangement in which the NR P is essentially free of any child minutiae for 12 days out of 14. The upside of this arrangement is that little or no money need change hands since both parents are on an equal footing when it comes to working.

Duchesse

i kind of agree with you. People split and the RP still has bills to pay. The fact my ex has a chunk of wonga in the bank and no mortgage is thanks to her dilagence in the past, long before we met.

I would absolutely live to have my dd 50:50. But firstly my ex is not exaxtly bending over backwards in agreeing access, even my suggestion to have dd two nights every other w/e and one night in the week is questioned. She'd like to put her into Saturday school also which would make it harder for me to spend any decent amount of time with dd at the weekends ( i live an hour or so away ).

She simply wouldn't agree to 50:50. And to be honest my work, even factoring in flexitime would't allow me to do it, as in order to continue making a decent CM payment AND finance my own home including clothes, a bed, toys etc etc for dd , i work on like a dog five days a week and go home to an empty house.

I do actually think 50% of childcare is fair, but then i also think it fair to reduce the CM from 600+ to 350 . Probably end up paying exactly the same :-)

Just because my dd is only with me two nights a fortnight, doesnt mean i want her to have a cheap bed etc.

Essentially i am already paying half the costs of childcare.